Belarus Elections: Dictating Democracy?
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Belarus Elections: Dictating Democracy? Introduction The Western media coverage of the September 9th presidential elections in Belarus posed the poll, in stark terms, as the struggle for democracy against the current leader, Alexander Lukashenka, billed as ‘the continent’s last hardline Communist dictator’.1 The press attention focused on the ‘reign of terror in a Soviet time warp’ with lurid allegations of mysterious ‘disappearances’ and the repression of the opposition, united for democracy behind Vladimir Goncharik.2 The Wall Street Journal Europe described the contest as ‘one of the last battles of the Cold War’.3 The Cold War rhetoric has been particularly played upon by leading United States politicians, US Secretary of State, Colin Powell describing the Belarus regime as ‘the lone remaining outlaw in Europe’.4 American ambassador to Belarus, Michael Kozak, was happy to draw parallels between his work there and his Cold War job under president Reagan, providing advice and assistance to the Contra opposition to the left-leaning Sandinista regime in Nicaragua: ‘As regards parallels between Nicaragua… and Belarus today, I plead guilty… Our objective and to some degree methodology are the same’.5 The United States has pumped around $50 million into funding the political opposition to Lukashenka over the past two years.6 The influential Washington–based Democratization Policy Institute argues that the US is right to help the ‘democratic opposition and civic forces’ in order to ‘decisively tip the balance…against the anachronistic regime’.7 In response, the Belarus government has accused the permanent mission of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Belarus of being the headquarters of the opposition forces attempting a Yugoslavia-style coup and views the Western election monitors as part of an international campaign of ‘spreading dirt over the elections’.8 Many Western commentators expected the opposition parties to hold mass protests against government attempts to fix the election results, following the Yugoslav scenario.9 Civil society movements claiming a broad base of support argued that ‘the most important moment is the next morning’ when mass protests were planned to topple the government.10 According to preliminary results, which do not include data from polling stations abroad, Lukashenka won 75.62% of the vote, the unified opposition candidate Vladimir Goncharik polled 15.39% and the Liberal Democratic Party leader Sergey Gaidukevich 2.48%.11 The opposition political parties and independent NGOs have called for the election results to be annulled citing ‘unprecedented falsification’ and ‘gross violations’.12 Meanwhile the United States and the European Union have made statements siding with the conclusions of the OSCE’s International Limited Election Observation Mission, representing Council of Europe, European Union and OSCE parliamentarians, that the election fell short of international democratic standards. In a statement adopted in Brussels on 14 September, the EU leaders expressed regret at the reported harassment of the political opposition, domestic observers, independent media and non-governmental organisations in Belarus.13 1 The experience of monitoring the elections in Belarus revealed a very different reality from that portrayed in the press accounts. There was little tension or controversy and little sign of either a dictatorship or of a planned Western-backed coup. I observed the count in Minsk, where the opposition had most support, at one of the only polling stations where the election committee was composed of Goncharik supporters from the Trade Union Federation. Domestic observers from the OSCE-sponsored Independent Observation group were genuinely disappointed that even at this polling station, where they argued there could have been no manipulation or fraud, the incumbent had received 61% against Goncharik’s 35%. This result, considering the much lower support for the opposition candidate outside Minsk, fitted with the results claimed by the Central Election Commission for the country as a whole.14 On the day there was a high turn-out of 83.85% and the OSCE monitors reported that the voting was orderly.15 Gerard Stoudmann, the head of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, monitoring the elections, stated at the post election press conference on 10th September that the OSCE had no evidence of manipulation or fraud of the results on election day.16 The other major international body monitoring the elections in close co-operation with the OSCE, the Association of Central and East European Election Officials found the election ‘free and open, and in compliance with all universal democratic institutions’.17 Hrair Balian, the head of the OSCE monitoring mission similarly declined to criticise the procedures on the voting day itself.18 The lack of evidence of election fraud or of any popular protest against Lukashenka, stood in sharp contrast to the exaggerated fears (or hopes) of Western commentators. The gap between reality and these high-blown expectations lay in the fact that the portrayal of the elections as an historic one of democracy against dictatorship was a misleading framework. Lukashenka is hardly an old-fashioned dictator and the opposition ‘democracy’ campaign had little to do with democracy. Dictatorship? Alexander Lukashenka may be seen in the West as an old communist but in fact he is neither old nor communist. At 47 years of age he is fifteen years younger than the main presidential challenger. He is also an opponent of the old Communist nomenklatura; in fact, the Communist Party of Belarus played a high profile role in the united opposition campaign to unseat him. Lukashenka is very much a political pragmatist. With minimal foreign investment and restricted export opportunities to the West, he has been forced to play on the importance of trade links with Russia and to advocate a gradualist approach to economic reform. This approach has won widespread support within Belarus itself, particularly among those who rely on state subsidy, for example, pensioners, who make up nearly a third of the country’s population, rural workers and those reliant on public-sector employment. With access to Russian TV and press, Belarusians count themselves fortunate to have regularly paid wages, high levels of employment and state pensions and subsidies, as well as few social problems such as drugs or crime.19 2 While it is true that Lukashenka maintains wide popular support, it would not be right to suggest that the election process is as free and open as in the West. Lukashenka has been reluctant to provide his political opponents with much assistance and only ceded the bare minimum of space for the contestation of political ideas. Limited state funding for the election campaign, approximately $12,500 per candidate, and restricted allocations of TV and media space for political candidates meant that the opposition was at a disadvantage.20 There was little evidence of a substantial campaign by either Lukashenka or the opposing candidates and little atmosphere of an election contest as the public display of election materials was limited to a small number of approved sites. Most of the election publicity was provided by the Central Election Commission through a substantial public information campaign with neutral posters and TV spots informing the electorate of the elections and voting procedures. The OSCE has afforded Belarus ‘special attention’ over the last few years and sees the country as an exception to the more European integrationist trends in the rest of the region.21 Running on an opposition anti-corruption platform, Lukashenka won a shock landslide presidential election victory in 1994 with 82% of the votes in the second round. Following a popular referendum on constitutional reform, in 1996, Lukashenka’s presidential powers were extended and the influence of the Belarus parliament reduced. A number of MPs resigned from the new parliament, forming an alternative government. In 1997 the Council of Europe suspended the Republic’s guest status and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly took the decision to recognise the rebel MPs as the legitimate representatives of the Belarus parliament. The US similarly viewed the new parliament as illegitimate and refused to recognise the regime. However, both the United States and the European Union are concerned that Belarus may shift away from a Western orbit. While treating the government as an international pariah, the State Department has followed a policy of ‘selective engagement’. State Department briefings make the point that the ‘key targets’ for this engagement were the independent media and the non-governmental sector in order to ‘provide a measure of support to those seeking democratic change and help to build constituencies for that change’.22 As part of this process, the Belarus government was pressurised into accepting the establishment of a permanent OSCE mission, the Advisory and Monitoring Group (AMG) in February 1998. Tasked with developing democracy and political pluralism, the OSCE programme is based on a strategy of ‘parallel but separate’ initiatives, arranging separate seminars, conferences and training for both government and state institutions and for parties and associations outside the government framework.23 The ‘Single Democratic Candidate’? The Western media coverage of a struggle between ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’ had much to do with the fact that the Belarus opposition